Rewinding is going the way of the dodo bird…

Here at Knitted Wit, we are always growing, changing, evolving. Developing new colors, trying out new bases, working with new designers and companies: one thing you can definitely say about us is we don’t let dust grow on this business of ours. It is one of the new policies we are putting into place that we want to share with you today. We are discontinuing a yarn-handling policy that you may or may not even realized we’ve been doing: we are no longer rewinding our skeins after dyeing. As some of our peeps have said to us (and this really shows our age and theirs, as you’ll see shortly):

Be Kind, Don’t Rewind

(This is a take on the mantra of the VHS rental shop: Be Kind, Rewind, meaning, rewind the VHS tape after watching it, so the next person who rents this movie can just watch it instead of spending the felt-like-an-eternity time it took to rewind. You see, children, technology has come a long way in the last 30 years or so. A long long way.)

Once upon a time, we decided to rewind all of our skeins. Rewinding distributes colors aesthetically throughout the skeins, and softens things up a bit. Once a skein has been rewound, you can’t tell where different dye colors have been applied, and for our semi-solid colors, the subtle transitions are even more subtle. However, rewinding skeins is very time consuming, and over the past several months, we’ve been engaging in something we all engage in: looking for more time. We realized that we could save quite a bit of that oh-so-elusive time by merely twisting and labeling our skeins once they are dry after dyeing, AND we talked to a lot of our customers, both retail and wholesale, for their take on it. The consensus was: Be Kind, Don’t Rewind.

What does this mean for you? Well, it means your skeins will look a bit different than you may be used to. The exact same skein that you have grown to know and love will look a bit less color-muddled, with color transitions more evident. Here’s a photo of our Yosemite colorway as an example:

The skein on the left has not be rewound; the colors appear more concentrated and chunky. The skein on the right HAS been rewound, and the colors are more distributed. One of the biggest pieces of feedback we received in favor of NOT rewinding was that crafty folk can more easily see how a colorway is going to play out in the creating if the skein hasn’t been rewound. They can more easily see how much of one color as opposed to another color lives in that skein, and they can more readily plan out a project or choose complementary colors for something.

As we roll out the non-rewinding policy, we are also getting all of our variegated colorways knitted up into swatches, so you can see how each colorway behaves when worked. It’s a process, so will take a while, but, eventually, we’ll have photos of all of our skeins (un-rewound, of course), as well as a blocked swatch, on our Etsy site, so you can see how a particular skein behaves itself when knitted. Pretty cool, huh?